Coatings plays a useful role in the manufacture of a great many articles which find wide use in nearly all facets of contemporary life. Until recently, nearly all coatings were applied with the employment of a hydrocarbon based vehicle which evaporated leaving the dried coating on the article which was to be coated. This system met with increasing disfavor as the cost of energy needed to drive off the solvent at the rate required by industry increased, as the price of the organic solvent itself increased and as the deleterious environmental effects of the evaporated solvent became better understood. Systems aimed at solvent recovery to reduce pollution and conserve solvent have generally proved to be energy intensive and costly.
In response, those skilled in the art have devised a class of coatings termed radiation-curable coatings. In one type of radiation-curing termed photocuring, a solution of a photoinitiator in a reactive coating liquid is employed. The liquid approaches a pollution-free system as almost all of the liquid is converted to cured coating with little or no solvent emission upon the brief exposure of the coated substrate to radiation such as electron beam or ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light equipment generally has a low demand for electrical energy and thus many technical and cost deficiencies caused by the pollution and energy problems of organic solvent systems are overcome.
Among the useful radiation curable coatings are those formulated with urethane-acrylates such as those disclosed in U.S. No. Reissue 29,131. Because of the wide use which radiation curable coatings have found, and, particularly because of the many advantages of radiation curable coatings which are formulated with urethane-acrylates, any new radiation-curable composition or any new compound which can be formulated into radiation curable compositions, especially novel urethane-acrylate compounds, would be very useful.